JCSM's Weekly Devotions (click here to listen!)

"The One Who Quenches Our Thirst"

Psalm 63:1-4  "O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You. In a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.  So I have looked for You in the sanctuary, to see Your power and Your glory.  Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise You.  Thus I will bless You while I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name."

Psalm 42:1, 2  "As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  When shall I come and appear before God?"

John 7:37-39  "On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, 'If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.  He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'  But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified."

Revelation 21:6, 7  "And He said to me, 'It is done!  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.  I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts.  He who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be his God and he shall be My son.'"

Insight: Everyone thirsts for God.  Some of us try and quench this thirst with worldly things that God has created.  They never fully satisfy us, though.  In order to quench that spiritual thirst, we need to implement spiritual principles and obey God.  Only then will we be truly satisfied and filled.

Prayer: "Dear Lord, help us to quench our thirst with You.  Forgive us for trying to quench it with lesser things.  Thank you for having patience and mercy on us.  You are a great God.  Expose the things that we do that are not pleasing to You.  Help us to repent and stay close to You.  Let us see sin as You see it and let us call it what You call it.  Thank you for your Word and how You show us the way to live in it.  Increase our faith in You and increase our love for You and for others.  In Jesus' name, Amen."

America's Foundation

John Jay, Jr. (1817-1894), was a lawyer, diplomat, the son of Judge William Jay and the grandson of John Jay, the Founding Father who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  He was the manager of the New York Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, secretary of the Irish Relief Commission during the potato famine in 1847, U.S. Minister to Austria, 1869-75, and the vice-president of the Civil Service Reform Association of the State of New York.  He served as the president of the American Historical Society, 1890 as well as being an active member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design.  John Jay authored many papers, including: "America Free of American Slave," 1856, "On the Passage of the Constitutional Amendment," 1864, and "Abolishing Slavery," 1864.

In 1887, being the president of the Westchester County Bible Society, John Jay delivered his message "National Perils and Opportunities":

"'It is high time to wake out of sleep!'  This gathering of citizens from distant parts, representing the millions who hold to the Bible, and cherish the institutions founded upon its inspired truths, shows that the nation is awakening to the perils, foreign and domestic, which threatens the purity of its Christian civilization.

"Its intellectual and moral strength in our Revolutionary struggle were recognized by the world, and Burke rightly attributed that strength to the character of the emigrants from various lands exhibiting 'the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.'  They brought with them the best and most heroic blood of the peoples of Europe - of the Hollanders, the Waloons of Flanders, the Huguenots of France, the English, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish, of the Norwegians and Swedes, the Germans and the Swiss, of the Bohemian followers of John Hus, of the Albigenses and Waldenses of the Italian Alps, of the Salzbury exiles, the Moravian brothers, with refugees from the Pallatinate, Alsace and southern Germany.

"They all brought the Bible, for which they and their ancestors had been ready to suffer and to die; and their devotion to that Book descended to the Continental Congress, which, a week before it was driven from Philadelphia, ordered an importation of twenty thousand Bibles.

"At the Centennial celebration, at Philadelphia, of the Declaration of Independence, the Acting Vice-President, Ferry, said that the American statesmen who had to choose between the royal authority or popular sovereignty had been inspired by the truth uttered on Mars Hill, and repeated in the opening prayer of the morning, that 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men.'" ¹

¹ 1887, in "National Perils and Opportunities," pp. 8-9.  Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, Oregon: American Heritage Ministries, 1987), p. 250.

If you'd like to see more quotes from those that framed and founded America, please click here: http://jcsm.org/AmericasFounders/.

A Moment of Introspection

(This explanation came from "The Skeptic's Annotated Bible: Corrected and Explained", by Jason Gastrich.  This book is on CD and explains over 3,000 difficulties regarding the entire Bible at http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.org.  There is also a 300 question workbook that accompanies the CD-ROM.)

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